Tuesday, October 28, 2008

After Senate Rebuke, McCain Still Helped Keating Associate

John McCain is a real prize. The Arizona Senator was sharply rebuked by his colleagues for helping Charles Keating navigate through Congress and ultimately ended up helping the American people bail out the Savings and Loan industry nearly twenty years ago. Now a reformed politician would have severed all ties with a crook like Keating after that experience, but not the mavericky John McCain! He readily put his hands back in the mud, or shall I say dirty land swaps for one of Keating's friends.

From McClatchy:

The owners of the Spur Cross Ranch, a dramatic 2,154-acre tract of Sonoran desert just north of Phoenix, in the late 1990s sought to sell it to a developer who planned to build a premier golf course surrounded by 390 luxury homes.

Nearby residents and environmentalists, however, wanted to preserve the area's unusual cacti, stone formations and hundreds of Hopi Indian tribal artifacts.

After opposition surfaced, the developer sought McCain's help in forging a land swap with the U.S. Forest Service — a deal that also would benefit the owners of the ranch, including a company controlled by billionaire Carl H. Lindner Jr., an associate of S&L chief Charles H. Keating.

McCain and an aide pushed for the exchange in more than a half dozen sometimes-testy letters and phone calls up and down the Forest Service's hierarchy, according to former agency officials and correspondence. McCain's office even circulated draft legislation that would have overridden the agency's objection to surrendering national forest land. Ultimately, the deal fell apart.

Now this was all during the time he was engaged in grandstanding over campaign finance-reform. McCain talked tough in front of the cameras and on the Senate floor, but in the backrooms he was a much more amiable guy for wealthy developers that had to deal with pesky environmentalists. Thankfully that deal fell apart, but it still shows just what kind of politician John McCain is versus the pseudo-reformer he claims to be.